PrintMarch 6, 2010
(Honorary) Dr. Al Gore
The University of Tennessee announced that former Vice President Al Gore will receive an honorary doctorate of Laws and Humane Letters in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology on May 14 at graduation ceremonies, where he will be the featured commencement speaker. Reporter Chloe White Kennedy wrote on knoxnews.com that UT chancellor Jimmy (no tongue in) Cheek said:
Vice President Gore's career has been marked by visionary leadership, and his work has quite literally changed our planet for the better. He is among the most accomplished and respected Tennesseans in history, and it is fitting that he should be honored by the flagship education institution of his home state.
Al will be adding to an impressive haul of honors and accolades that he's accumulated over the years, including the first runner-up for Time Person of the Year in 2007, the Dan David award from Israel (with a million bucks), an Oscar, and the Nobel Peace Prize (and another million).
The green champion of global warming recently emerged from wherever he had been hiding since Climategate broke to submit a self-serving op-ed piece to the New York Times. Gore wrote,
But unfortunately, the reality of the danger we are courting has not been changed by the discovery of at least two mistakes in the thousands of pages of careful scientific work over the last 22 years by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
The two errors to which Al referred were the claim the Himalayan glaciers were melting because of an article in a hiking magazine and the failure of certain researchers to abide by British Freedom of Information Act requests from climate change skeptics. In the Times piece, he also wrote that "e-mail messages stolen from the University of East Anglia in Britain showed that scientists besieged by an onslaught of hostile, make-work demands from climate skeptics may not have adequately followed the requirements of the British freedom of information law."
Did Al actually read the article to which he provided the link in the quote above? It talked about how the scientists "flouted" regulations. Those were the same poor scientists "besieged by an onslaught of hostile, make work demands" who cheered at the death of a leading skeptic who had been hounding them to validate their alarmist claims.
Al conveniently ignored recent admissions by lead climate conspirator Phil Jones that there's been no warming for fifteen years when he amazingly wrote, "What is important is that the overwhelming consensus on global warming remains unchanged."
But Al cannot afford to accept this inconvenient truth. Climategate exposed the leading climatologists and global warming experts as conspirators, data-fabricators, and obstructionists. Al's got too much skin in the game, standing to make billions if Obama advocates for cap-and-trade as he's done for health care reform.
According to the U.K. paper The Guardian, Gore has invested in one company that received over half a billion dollars in subsidies from the Department of Energy. Another company he's involved with received $683 million for "green investment." With those two companies alone, Gore has interests that control over a billion dollars in U.S. funds, and if cap-and-trade is ever passed, he'll control much, much more.
Hypocrisy is nothing new to Al Gore. He huffed (through a spokesperson, naturally) that he purchased more than enough green power to balance his electricity costs. However, in February 2007, Bruce Nussbaum reported in Business Week:
The average household in America consumes 10,656 kilowatt-hours (kWh) per year, according to the Department of Energy. In 2006, Gore devoured nearly 221,000 kWh-more than 20 times the national average.
And that's just one of his three houses. Gore also has places in Carthage, Tennessee and in the vicinity of Washington, D.C. Between his electric and gas utility bills, Al spends more than $40,000 per year on just the Nashville house's energy. Spokeswoman Kalee Kreider defended his energy use to CBS news, sniffing that "[s]ometimes when people don't like the message, in this case that global warming is real, it's convenient to attack the messenger."
That's just what these poor kids graduating from UT need to hear as their refuge of higher education is gone and it's time to look for nonexistent jobs in a terrible economy. They need to have their heads filled on the way out the door that they are responsible for the environmental destruction of the planet like they need a hole in the head.
Al Gore has no business to talk. He'll fly out of Knoxville in a private jet. Or he'll motor to his mansion in Nashville, only four times the size of the average house, but an energy hog with consumption that dwarfs the use by the average American household by orders of magnitude.
Abraham Lincoln said, "You can fool all of the people some of the time, and some of the people all of the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time." Apparently the only people still fooled by Al Gore in Tennessee are the academics running the State University in Knoxville.
His fellow Tennesseans are not. The knoxnews.com website that published the article conducted an online poll. More than 90% of almost 14,000 people who've responded thus far expressed the opinion that Gore doesn't deserve the honorary degree.
John Leonard can be reached at john@southernprose.com. He is the Atlanta Creationism writer for examiner.com. His first book, titled Hybrid Theory: Reconciling Creationism and Evolution Theory, is pending publication by epress-online.
